Graham Parker is as comfortable in his skin and niche as an artist could be, a good nature curmudgeon if there ever was one (if there is in fact such a thing). He’s too prickly for a mainstream audience to embrace him, but that doesn’t deny this transplanted Brit’s prowess for writing great pop songs, only that his persona doesn’t lend itself either to the warm and fuzzies, contrived melodrama or the slavish idolatry that fuels the cult of personality.
Graham Parker’s mistake was not really a novel one: he was simply ahead of his time. He landed a magnificent one-two punch of a debut comprised of Howlin’ Wind and Heat Treatment: (no sophomore slump here as both were released in 1976! The next year after punk hit and a dazed world regained some, but not all, its senses, Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson stole the thunder of a man who was (and still is) perhaps too real for his own good.
Parker didn’t sugarcoat things then and close to four decades later he still refuses to. But as evidenced by his jocular repartee with Doug Collette, the man has retained his sense of humor, a saving grace that allows him a healthy sense of detachment as he proffers his barbed perceptions of the world around him. Graham has never become the bitter jaded sort that might otherwise be the logical progression of the ‘angry young man’ persona he radiated in his early days.
Not surprisingly, he’s never seriously compromised his work over the years either, though there have been those moments, Another Grey Area and Steady Nerves, for instance, where he consciously or unconsciously softened his approach. But from the mid-eighties though the present, he’s been as independent as he is iconoclastic, preferring to write and perform solo as often as not–though his ongoing partnership with a bar band deluxe called The Figgs, is a recurring collaboration–on the stage and in the studio.
He has accommodated the changes in the record business at large with finesse and grace, two virtues that, if they are not always on the surface of his songs, never lie too far beneath either. His latest work, Imaginary Television, may in fact be his most ambitious piece of work: eleven songs based on plotlines of fictional television shows (following a couple such failed commissions in the real world), Parker continues to hone his wit through artful understatement, commenting on culture with his acerbic insight in a setting that showcases his varied strengths as a songwriter and a skillful, smart recording artist. It’s a brilliant concept, made all the more so because the music stands on its own as a collection of personal and topical snapshots.
Clearly more enraptured by how the new album came to be than how popular it might eventually become in the marketplace, Graham Parker remains beholden to no one and seems to relish his role and his stance as such, revealing no regrets in this conversation covering his ingenious new album, the creative process and how music sometimes becomes an obstacle to those pursuits that could easily dominate the rest of his life.
I was listening to the new album Imaginary Television the other day and thinking back on how I discovered you back in 1976 and it occurred to me how great it is you’re still working and doing what you do.
Well, thanks! (laughs) It’s pretty surprising to me a lot of the time.
I was going to ask if it’s something of a surprise but you still seem to be enjoying it…
You know when you start off , you’re twenty-four or twenty-five and you’re trying to get a record deal, if you get to three albums, it’ll be quite a feat and that’s pretty much what it felt like then. For many people I’m sure, the extremely difficult, weird third album will come out and then you’ll sort of disappear into some strange country estate and never be seen again. It didn’t quite work out like that…for anybody actually.
Well, no, but I can think a few people I’d like to put in that country estate
That would be good idea for a lot…I just kept plugging away through all kinds of ups and downs, more medium than ups and down, a long average ride as i sometimes describe it jokingly. The records just keep coming out: I’ve been fairly prolific even though I feel like I’m extraordinarily lazy. I do an album and it’s like a year later and I think "I can’t believe I haven’t written and gotten an album out–what’s wrong with me?" But other people say "Wow you’re really prolific" so it just depends n what you’re using to gauge things. Studio albums of original material–I’ve got quite a few.
An album every couple of years these days when it’s so common for an artist to take three to five years between albums– you are working at a pretty good clip. I wanted to ask you about your work ethic: do you make yourself try to write every day? Do you set aside time to just play and see what comes from it? Or do you just wait for the lightning bolt of inspiration to hit, then wait til there’s a commercial on the soccer channel?
That’s pretty much it. I Wait. I spend an awful lot of time avoiding. I’ll do anything to stop writing. Someone comes around and says "You want to come for a drink or are you busy?" and it’s "No no…" It’s like the Seinfeld episode when they’re working on their pilot episode…
I was just thinking of that: anything to put the notebook down! (laughs)
Yes, yes. It’s like facing mortality–it’s not a pretty sight. It’s not fun and there’s nothing good about it until you write a song. It’s work work work and it’s "What a pathetic human being I am" and "What a piece of rubbish this is!" "This is never going to fly"…"I’ve had it!" and then this mysterious thing happens–which I don’t even know how it happens– and I look down at a page of words and I think …
It wasn’t there an hour ago…
Exactly…it wasn’t there and it took me two days to get to it. Now this little conceit I used for this album, I actually performed some magic. It brought some magic out of me as I came up with a very vague idea, a plot–a character in my head more than anything–and I might’ve scribbled down the first idea, then I wrote a song–BOOM–then in two months I had an album in front of me. It really worked for me this idea: the visual aspect of seeing a character or a plot line kicked me into it and it was a very good exercise and from then on the songwriter took over on a subconscious level. Otherwise, they would just be songs straight from the surface of my head that meant nothing, but some deeper stuff is going to come out.
But that’s not something I think about. It’s the craft and is it catchy?…Is this really a good hook and are there lots of hooks? Which is really what I’ve been thinking from Howling Wind (Parker’s first album) onward: are they catchy songs?
The mind tends to over-complicate things anyway, so I’m sure after a few years of writing songs it becomes a subconscious habit that once you get started, it’s like the old saw of riding the bicycle: you work the pedals, you use the brake, you coast a while then you pick up speed, then you’ve got an album.
I wanted to ask about how Imaginary Television came to be because I read your description of the sequence of events that led up to and through it; I wondered if any of the material you used for the plot lines for these shows was some fiction that you had written previously for a whole other purpose and started pulling on that?
Oh right!…oh no… I do have some short stories in the computer that I kept writing after Carp Fishing Valium (GP’s previously published book of fiction-St. Martin’s Press, 2001) and I have the rights back to the book, so maybe someday when I get a break from this music business (which is my day job), I will perhaps try to republish that with a few different stories on Kindle or something like that, but right now it’s off my radar. But nothing in the stories is from the past, it’s all current.
So when I got the proposals that my publishing company sent me from the real TV shows in the spring of 2009, that’s when this whole thing started. Everything I came up with after that, when I realized; "Wouldn’t it be fun to invent my own shows then write songs for them –so I wouldn’t get rejected!–that was basically the idea. It was all original stuff. There wasn’t one thing there that was being reworked or dug up from the vault or anything hidden away. It’s all fresh stuff.
It sounds like you really got caught up in the excitement and really got pumped up with doing this stuff. How long would you say it was when that lighting bolt hit you and when you basically had everything written and ready to review in terms of the plots and the songs?
The songs were a couple of months and then I booked some studio time and went in and did some basic tracks with just me and a guitar and a rhythm machine and I put down the bass. Then I went back to the original stories I had written down: like two lines– that’s all I had. It’s a visualization thing that went on with me. I scribbled down those two lines back in the spring and early summer and realized this could be a concept, the rest of the plot was fleshed out in my head but I didn’t write it down. I entered the sphere of the plots, but I didn’t really adhere to them in writing the songs. The plots that you read in the liner notes of the album I wrote down after I wrote the songs, actually. After I recorded the album I fleshed them out. It sounds very mystical, but songwriting is in a way..
Oh yeah!…
Well writing of any kind actually. It’s ninety percent perspiration and ten percent inspiration> It is very metaphysical: you go way out there in a way quite beyond yourself, then kind of drop back into the real world to make sure the mechanics are good. And usually the third verse is awful, so you have to rewrite that!
So that was very much the sequence of events. I got the idea, I scribbled down a very vague note–a guy in the army gets mixed up with drug experiments and goes on this trip, where later on it kicks in after after he gets out of the army ("You’re Not Where You Think You are")—then the album’s down and I’m thinking "Wow, I better get busy fleshing these things out!" But that stuff is easy for me–coming up with the ideas is harder. But nothing was hard about this–this was fun. It was amazing!
As I was listening to the album and going back and forth between the songs and the plots, it occurred to me that some of these plotlines, like "Head on Straight" and "Snowgun"–they’re not all far out of the realm that someone might think these are good ideas for a regular series. How absurd do you think that might be?–I don’t think it’s absurd at all!
I don’t think so either. Somebody emailed me-a musician- just a few days ago and said "This is like life imitating art–this is outrageous!" Sometime ago they had a song picked up for a show–I forget the name but it’s an actual show–and it’s a song that got picked up because the director went on the Internet and found the song and it’s perfect for the plot line. And I read it and I said it’s exactly like one of my stories.
That’s what I thought! Surfing across the some of the reality TV shows that I see, I go: "You know Graham Parker could end up a television mogul here." Alec Baldwin is going to want to spend of some his discretionary income subsidizing your new career!
Well, that would be hilarious. I don’t know how to get in touch with those people…I don’t know how to mix in those circles. I really could do with some of those connections right now– to the actors and directors of this world. In my blog I wrote "Judd Apatow call me" and it would be absurd–I would be over the moon with childish teenage happiness if that would happen.
I can only imagine the glee you would take in dealing with that kind of fame and celebrity, out of nowhere, after all these years. I’d love to see you on The View...
I’d like to be the person who wrote it, so you’d never see who I am, because I don’t want to get involved in all that stuff again. I went through it once for four years when my career began and I thought I was going to be some huge star and it was enough already–sneaking out the back of venues. Because the money’s good, but nothing else is good.
I wanted to talk about how you do work these days and specifically how you decide when you’re going to do solo shows and when you’re going to work with The Figgs and how you set up your tour schedule. I saw you back in 2006 and you told a lot of great stories between songs about taking care of your kids, so I wondered how much you divide your time between being a husband, father and musician and how you prioritize all that?
My daughter’s grown up in Fiji–she’s in the Peace Corps which is great thing….and my son is fourteen. Before I forget have you seen "Sunglasses-the Graham Parker show"? (video skit on GP website where he poses as host of TV show)
I did and I thought "C’mon, you should be on NBC in place of Jimmy Fallon!", but that’s not my call…
Yeah, that’s another story. But you know it’s not really a stretch to juggle these kinds of worlds because I’m lucky inasmuch as I do play solo to make money. None of us are making money out of CD’s these days, unfortunately, and when I say none of us, I mean even those who have had multi-million sellers in the past. Some of these people put their albums out on their own little label. I’m lucky to be with Bloodshot (indie label out of Chicago)–at least they’re bigger than Up Yours Records, my own label.
You must have a pretty good relationship with Bloodshot though…
They’re very good. You know I do the same thing I’ve always done, regarding juggling all this stuff, I do a record and nobody hears it til it’s done, then I give it to the record company. In the old days they used to give me ridiculous sums of money, especially in the Arista days, I used to pay absurd sums of money I paid producers absurd sums, I paid absurd sums to take the band on the road–everything was money bought from the record company, but in fact it was the same deal: I wouldn’t let them in the studio til it was finished.
Good for you!
Then we’d have guys down from the record company and we’d give them champagne and other things so they felt very good when they listened to it. These days I just send it to Bloodshot and tell them basically "This is how much it costs… and it’s not very much…and I’d like that back in advance. And every time I’ve done that, they’ve said "Great–we like it!" And so I am basically on a one-album-at-a-time deal with them—which isn’t a deal at all really.
I wondered if it was a project-by- project arrangement. I’ve talked with other musicians who’ve really have found that works to their benefit and the label’s, because nobody feels pressured.
Exactly. If they don’t want it, then it’s fine. I’m a big boy, I can take it. I’ve got my own website if I want to do that kind of thing. I would prefer to stay with Bloodshot. As someone would say to me "Graham, there’s other labels.." They’re no different and Bloodshot’s probably as good as any–and better than most I would say, the people are honest when it comes to money: they’re not doing any slight of hand. They would’ve been a lot richer by now and they would’ve had a lot worse acts on their label, if we’re trying to do that.
For that reason alone, they’re worth giving the benefit of the doubt and the first option. If you can trust them with your dough, you can probably trust them with your music.
Yeah and Marah (Eakin, Bloodshot Publicity) is doing a great job with the press.
She’s really enthusiastic.
Yeah, they’re really good and it just fits in because I tell my agent I don’t want to do gigs in the winter. I do not want to deal with weather events and I want to go skiing with my daughter when she’s home and have freedom to take my son skiing. That’s it. I don’t want to find I’ve got a gig when there’s a great big blizzard coming and I’m driving to Newark to drive to O’hare, you know?
Absolutely…
But you know that can happen in April. You can get stuck in any weather. But basically I keep about three months of winter out of the way–if something interesting pops up or the money’s good I might do it–but basically that’s my MO. And in the summer, lots of summers, I don’t want to do gigs: nobody comes to pubs–at least my audience! And I’m in a soccer team, so I’m playing soccer. This year it looks like I’ll be doing some gigs in the summer because the soccer team is in the spring and that’s when I’m touring, so I’ve screwed that all up; my over-forties league starts in April man and I’m missing it for gigs–do you understand?!
Well, everybody takes a hiatus from things…
Well, it’s a huge sacrifice
You can make a huge comeback– play the game David Beckham did to come to the United states instead of staying in England, something like that…
There you go. I can make a huge comeback on my soccer career, my friend, but I’m pushing sixty! I did play indoors for a couple of months in the winter and I did go skiing in the morning and soccer in the evening: what a life–cant beat it!
That’s like the definition of seasonal employment! You move from climate to climate depending on what you want to do and what you feel like doing.
Absolutely. It all works together in some kind of beautiful way. Sometimes I think the music’s getting in my way!
I can see where you might think that. You seem so genuine interested in so many different things, it must be refreshing to go back to music: it’s like rediscovering it every project.
It really is- I do rediscover it. Plus my other real interest is nature, so I’m always out here in the Catskills, watching the wood ducks arrive in the spring. Me and my son have an aquarium full of tadpoles at the moment, so there’s that. Music is really getting in the way, I’m sorry to tell you, but one must make sacrifices, musn’t one?
I understand what you’re talking about; I really feel privileged to know I’m probably doing one of the last ever interviews with Graham Parker talking about music, because pretty soon you’re going to be talking about soccer and tadpoles from the Catskill Mountains.
Yeah you’re one of the last pal, it’s all over after this. I will retreat to my obscure castle in the country
There you go…How do you coordinate your time with The Figgs(GP’s backing band since the Eighties)? I presume they have their own career and that they keep themselves busy, but they must still relish playing with you when they have a chance?
Yes..The Figgs and The Gentlemen., Mike Gent (guitarist and vocalist) plays in The Gentlemen and Pete Donnelly the bass player plays with Terry Adams of NRBQ and he plays with Soul Asylum and they all have day jobs as well, like Pete’s an engineer, for instance, so they’ve got a lot of irons in the fire. It’s not easy: it used to be easy when I first met them and they were young lads and they had a van with bunks in it and that was their ideal life, you know, kids growing up in Saratoga, New York together: wouldn’t it be great if we could equip a van with bunks and tour. And they became The Figgs and their dream came true and they were out there on the road. They got a deal with Capitol which lasted one album unfortunately and then they got to play with me: you know Mike Gent knows more about my music than I do–that’s the kind of people I’m working with. They’re really huge fans and they’re into it. So it’s great.
The band thing: I’m always surprised the huge amount of work that goes into it, especially as I can’t afford expensive tour managers to take care of all the details. I’m here right now with all the notes spread out in front of me and writing things down on contract pages about what time to get to the gig and where’s my hotel and all this stuff. I do all this stuff!
Hotel?…don’t you have a van with bunk beds in it?
No, I’m afraid not. I stay in a hotel and The Figgs, God bless ’em, in the Tri-state area, they usually stay with their friends and people they know to save money, so we don’t lose money on a hotel: this is how we work these days. No one can put a five piece band in a hotel and give them their own rooms you know.
Seriously, I can understand how the economic realities of that can be pretty foreboding if you try to do it long-term and not watch what you’re doing. When you guys start to get ready to go out on the road, how much prep time do you take to rehearse and get new material together or just refresh your memory?
We’ve just been in for three days, three compacted days of rehearsing and all. The lads did their work beforehand and, in fact, The Figgs did a gig and on the gig they did the song "It’s My Party (And I Won’t Cry") from the new record–they actually played it!
Nice!
You have to be on the ball! I spend days and days months in advance, playing the songs and imagining the band and how to play them with the band and coming up with arrangements and on a little recording device mp3-ing it to them, jotting down notes and emailing it to them, and saying here’s how I see these songs. It’s a tremendous amount of work that goes in for almost zero financial gain. As I like to say to people, we work four times as hard for a quarter of the money! It’s unbelievable: I never envisaged this. I envisaged a country abode where I’d be hiding like a hermit–I didn’t envisage working like everybody else!
